The Texas governor may be scoring political points for taking on EPA over pollution rules, but he could be putting his state’s energy companies at risk.

It’s become a staple for Republicans on the 2012 campaign trail to slam the Environmental Protection Agency as a job-killing government regulator. But Rick Perry was bashing EPA—on the stump and in practice—long before it was cool.

As governor of Texas, Perry has engaged in an outright war against EPA for years. Of course, tangling with federal environmental regulators isn’t unusual in the Lone Star State, where the economy deeply depends on the oil industry. Three of the world’s five biggest oil companies are headquartered in Houston, and Texas consumes more fossil fuels and spews more pollution than any other state.

But by any measure, Perry took the fight to new extremes, escalating long-simmering regulatory tension into a symbolic state-federal showdown. He repeatedly issued high-profile rebukes to EPA, refusing to comply with regulations and daring the agency to crack down with punitive measures that he knew could blow up politically in the middle of the 2012 presidential campaign. He channeled Texas regulators’ difficulties with EPA into his own swaggering narrative of a state oppressed by the federal government; he occasionally even threatened secession. Perry’s moves pumped up his national profile, but, critics argue, they hurt not only his state’s air quality but also the pocketbooks of the oil and gas corporations that are the lifeblood of its economy.

As far back as 2006—when former Texas Gov. George W. Bush, hardly known as an environmental enforcer, was in the White House—EPA repeatedly warned Perry that Texas’s unique system of regulating industrial air pollution violated the 40-year-old Clean Air Act.

Federal law requires big polluters such as oil refiners to control emissions of dangerous contaminants in each unit of a polluting plant to receive an operating permit. Texas has a “flexible permit” process that issues permits to facilities that simply measure emissions levels for plants as a whole, allowing plant operators to put controls on some—but not all—polluting units.

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Last year, after many warnings, EPA gave Texas a deadline of June 30 to submit a plan for a revised permitting process that complies with federal law or to surrender its pollution-licensing authority to Washington. Instead of working with Texas companies to satisfy the federal law, Perry’s Commission on Environmental Quality refused to meet the deadline. When EPA regulators were forced to step in and take over the permitting program, Perry grabbed headlines by charging that EPA was “willing to kill Texas jobs and derail one of the strongest industries in the country.”

Perry has made it clear that Texas has no intention of complying with climate-change rules.

Perry gained a political pop, but some industry officials in Texas grumbled about the practical results. Instead of getting pollution permits from a single state agency, they now must go through a new layer of regulation, applying separately for some permits from EPA, a process that experts say adds time and cost and can slow construction schedules.

The “flexible-permit” battle set the stage for the politically charged Texas-versus-EPA showdown over global warming. Earlier this year, EPA rolled out new regulations to control the carbon pollution that causes global warming. The agency was legally required to do so under a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that carbon pollution endangers human health and is legally subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. Not surprisingly, the controversial climate-change rules—which require factories, power plants, and oil refineries to use the best available technology to reduce carbon pollution—spurred a wave of pushback: 17 states and dozens of industry groups are suing the agency in a series of legal actions expected to drag on for years.

But most states took a standard precautionary measure: At the same time they are suing EPA, they are also working with the agency to find ways to comply with the rules. Then, if the states lose the lawsuits, they will already be on their way to meeting the new standards. States that do not comply with the rules—or need extra time to do so—will be subject to federal intervention, but those that opt for what experts call a “friendly FIP,” or federal implementation program, will dodge punitive measures and get help from EPA until they cut their pollution to permissible levels.

Texas alone opted for the unfriendly approach. It’s the only state that did not issue a plan for compliance—and Perry has made it clear that Texas has no intention of complying. The move was a blatant slap to the Obama administration—and once again gave Perry the national spotlight. Defying the climate rules offered him the perfect opportunity to loudly decry the science of global warming—which in his book Fed Up! he calls a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight”—and to slam EPA as a “rogue agency” with an “activist mind-set” that has “targeted Texas.” Such rhetoric is viral catnip to the tea party voters who could help catapult Perry to the 2012 presidential nomination.